Maybe that comes from years of having candidates and officeholders bob and weave during interviews. Crowley says she’ll ask the same question three times—and then “you have to wave the white flag” and move on—but not before announcing to the audience, “So clearly you’re not going to answer this.”

In the CNN newsroom, where I host Reliable Sources, I was anxious to get Crowley’s take on Mitt Romney’s appearance before a national Latino group last week. “His tone was significantly softer,” she said, no more talk about illegal immigrants having to “self-deport.”

Still: “Was there any change in policy? I don’t know, because we didn’t know what the policy was to begin with.”

Perhaps the most interesting moment was when I asked the veteran correspondent about how she practices meditation each day in her Washington bureau office.

“To me it orders my thought,” she said.

“It’s not as though I don’t get angry any more, or I’m not mad at this person or that person. But I don’t hold onto it as long as I used to… It brings me a sense of a place to go that’s calm…I actually treasure that time.”